Cameron and Miliband are all too predictable

Britain's general election campaign remains a tense stalemate. The governing Conservatives have been roughly level with the Labour opposition in the polls for most of this year. Sporadically, one of the parties will pull ahead for a few days, exciting commentators with the prospect of a decisive result on May 7. Then the party slips back, equilibrium is restored, and the cycle repeats. Even the televised debates, anticipated for so long, have failed to change much.

If the polls remain deadlocked, that is not so surprising. Anyone looking at Britain from the outside might wonder why a government with a well-regarded leader, David Cameron, and a thriving economy under its watch, is not cantering to victory. The mistake is to assume there are only two fundamentals in politics: leadership and the economy. There is a third: the "brand", or reputation, of the parties themselves. On this count, Labour soundly beat the Tories, who remain toxic in large areas of the country.

This is a contest between an unpopular party with a respected leader and a popular party with a leader, Ed Miliband, who does not command much respect. Seen like this, the stalemate is understandable.

There is no cause for fatalism, though. Each party still has the time and potential to build a meaningful lead. It will just require more imagination than they have shown of late. Neither Labour nor the Tories have said anything that you would not expect of them. Mr Miliband's opposition to favourable tax status for non-domiciled individuals, announced this week, makes some sense. But it will surprise nobody coming from him. Nor will his mansion tax or promise to restore the 50p top rate of income tax. These things are standard Labour fare. A policy can be popular on its own terms and still wound a party by confirming the worst suspicions about it. Similarly, Mr Cameron's aggressive plans for budget cuts in the next parliament are predictably Tory. His priorities in tax policy, such as raising the threshold at which people pay the 40p rate, are unlikely to change ingrained perceptions of his party and who it stands for.

The Labour core vote is being pitted against the Tory core vote. The era of big-tent leaders, the Thatchers and Blairs who strove to seduce voters traditionally identified with the opposite party, feels a long time ago. They understood that parties only make electoral gains when they confound their own stereotypes.

That is the task for Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband. They will soon publish their manifestos for government. If these are menus of policies crafted to appeal to their own natural supporters, Britain is heading for another hung parliament. If, however, one of them is brave enough to leave its ideological comfort zone, a late and decisive surge is theirs for the taking.

Imagine a Tory party that pledged a new levy on expensive homes, with the revenue going exclusively to the National Health Service. Or a Labour party war on government waste, combined with greater powers for public service users to choose their provider. None of these ideas is easy to execute; they all have flaws and risks. But at least they would disrupt the country's hardened views of the people aspiring to govern. Orthodox ideas have brought only electoral stasis.

It is no accident that Mr Cameron hit 50 per cent in the polls during his "modernising" phase as Tory leader, when he made a priority of un-Tory issues such as climate change and inequality. He has a few weeks left to rediscover that kind of derring-do, unless Mr Miliband beats him to it.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation